Incident on a Dark Street
Starring: Robert Pine, David Canary, James Olson... and WILLIAM SHATNER!
Genre: Legal Thriller
Year: 1973
My rating: 

I bought this DVD for one reason and one reason only. The picture on the cover features William Shatner with big hair and a fantastic 1970s porn mustache. I was expecting nothing more than silly, campy fun. Some crime-fighting, perhaps. Maybe some overdone and unbelievable fight sequences.

I didn't really get that. In fact, I didn't get anything like that at all. This was far more serious and competent than I was expecting. So, as it turns out, I did enjoy this DVD -- just not in the way I had anticipated.

The story is typical legal/mafia/thriller stuff. The mob is making a nuisance of itself again (killing off informers, blowing up potential informers, etc), so it's down to one fresh-out-of-law-school prosecutor to untangle the ubiquitous puzzle and pin charges onto the local, big, stereotypically Italian-American mafia boss. The local, big, stereotypically Italian-American mafia boss is not content to simply kill off important characters. He has also bribed two corrupt city government officials (William Shatner and some other, weedier guy) to provide fat contracts to companies he controls. Shatner plays a character by the name of "Deaver Wallace", a designation I have tried and failed to turn into a dirty pun.

The plot is not replete with originality; however, it does spring one or two good surprises. The dialog borders on silliness on a few occasions. And the attempts to give the characters some depth are occasionally successful, but more often than not they just fail to deliver.

On the other hand, I was impressed by the acting of the cast as a whole. The two leads (Robert Pine and David Canary) are certainly believable in their roles. And I have to give special props to Richard S. Castellano, and not just for his convincing performance. He plays a small-time crook without the brains to play with the big boys. But his brother has been murdered, so he's torn between wanting to turn the killers over to the police and his "honor among thieves" desire to not be a snitch (I think his mouth hangs open in abject confusion during every moment the camera is on him). But where he won me over was the sequence where the mob tries to get rid of him by flattening him with what appears to be a very fast moving steamroller. Credit to Castellano -- who was not a small man -- for being game enough to apparently do his own stunts. It certainly (to my untrained eye) looked like they really make this fat man leap from the path of a heavy construction equipment multiple times.

Additionally, mention must be made of William Shatner's performance, since I'm guessing his presence in this movie is what will motivate the majority of sales (including, as I mentioned, mine). Shatner always knows when to hold himself back, and when to start getting his saliva on the scenery. Had this been a cheesier script, I'm sure he would have let himself go. But given the semi-gritty flavor that the producers seemed to be going for, he has a suitably restrained performance. If you're looking for a repeat of him screaming, "KHAAAAAN!" or the '70s legal thriller equivalent of him standing waist deep in tribbles (Lord knows what that would be), you'll be disappointed. But his acting here is perfectly in keeping with the film's style (and I absolutely adored his response to a simple "I love you").

Oh, and I should mention Shatner's mistress since I found her first scene (which is also her pen-ultimate scene) utterly and completely bizarre. The girlfriend and her expensive tastes are one of the reasons Shatner is so desperately in need of constant money. In the scene -- which is now indelibly carved into my fragile mind -- this blonde bounds into the room wearing a distressingly paedophilic baby-doll nightie, starts playing with a stuffed giant panda, and enunciates every syllable like a slow preschooler watching Sesame Street's Two Headed Monster teach her how to say the word 'cat'. (Kuh! At! Kuh! At! Kuh-at! Cat!) I have no idea what the filmmakers were attempting with this scene, and if anyone out there does know, please don't hesitate to keep it to yourself.

I couldn't find any confirmation of this in my exhaustive research (about three seconds worth of tooling around Google and the Internet Movie Database), but my theory is that this movie was actually a TV series pilot that went nowhere. It certainly has all the touchstones of a first episode. There's the scene where the main character joins the law firm. The scene where he's introduced to all his co-workers, including a token woman and a token black man (they're on the picture on the back of the DVD box, in case you missed them on account of blinking during their scene). There's the sequence where he learns that his boss isn't totally heartless at all. The title music has a definite 1970s TV show theme feel to it. The boss (James Olsen) even gets a catch phrase to repeat ("Don't call me 'sir'.").

I'm reviewing the Digiview Productions release of this DVD. The sound quality is a little soft. The picture is slightly fuzzy. The colors are very washed out. So washed out, in fact, that the screen actually reverts to a black and white picture for a few seconds at least once.

Despite not getting out of this film the camp enjoyment I thought was my due, I appreciated what was there. It's not the best legal thriller out there, but it's entertaining enough.